Rough Drafts: The Auto-Picked Legacy Cube (for science)

Hello everyone! It's time for another edition of Rough Drafts! This week we are taking a break from flashback queues to play a Legacy Cube (I do have Mirrodin / Darksteel / Fifth Dawn recorded, so don't worry, the goal of having a video for every Modern flashback is still alive. It will just be posted a bit later, which is fine because we are going on flashback hiatus as Oath of the Gatewatch release events start next week.

Today we're sort of playing the Legacy Cube. Actually, we are going to let Magic Online draft a Legacy Cube deck for us!

Here's how drafting works on Magic Online. Once a draft starts, you get so many seconds to make each pick. It starts off at nearly two minutes for pick one and drops all the way to a few seconds for pick 15. If you don't make a selection in the required amount of time, Magic Online will auto-pick a card for you. Now the assumption is that Magic Online will just pick a random card, but there have been reports that this isn't exactly true. Most people say that Magic Online will pick a White card, and in my very subjective experience it tends to pick low-converted mana cost White cards. That said, most of the evidence comes from people who accidentally miss a pick here or there. We are looking to research the issue by letting Magic Onlineauto-pick every single card in our deck. Since we don't have to worry about making card selections, we will take on the role of researcher and try to figure out what criteria Magic Online uses to auto-select cards.

After the drafting ends we'll do our best to make a playable deck from what Magic Online gives us. Let's see if we can get lucky enough to win a game or two with a deck we had no part in drafting!

Let's get to the videos, then we'll discuss what we learned in our auto-picked draft. A quick reminder. If you enjoy the Rough Drafts series and the other video content on MTGGoldfish, make sure to subscribe to the MTGGoldfish Youtube Channel to keep up on all the latest and greatest.

Legacy Cube - The Auto-Picked Draft: Drafting

Legacy Cube - The Auto-Picked Draft: Round 1

Legacy Cube - The Auto-Picked Draft: Round 2

Legacy Cube - The Auto-Picked Draft: Finals (Round 3)

What we Learned

Magic Online will always, always, always auto-pick a White card if one is available in the pack. That occurrence happened 100% of the time, without exception.

If there are two White cards in the pack Magic Online will almost always pick a creature over a non-creature spell. This occurrence happened over 90% of the time. We had White creature plus White spell packs many times during the draft, and Magic Online took the creature every time — except once.

The one exception to the "creature over spell" rule is that Magic Online picked a Terminus over a Mentor of the Meek. I spent most of the rest of the draft trying to figure out why this happened, and I still have no clue. If you have any ideas, please let me know in the comments. I'm completely befuddled.

Let's say there are multiple White creatures in the same pack. In this situation, Magic Online will always pick the one with a lower-converted mana cost. Again, this happened 100% of the time.

Multi-color cards don't count as White cards in the eyes of Magic Online. We had three picks where a GW creature like Gaddock Teeg and Dragonlord Dromoka were the only White cards in the pack and Magic Online chose a off-color card over the multi-color card that contained White mana.

It is possible that Magic Online views lands that tap for only White mana as White non-creature cards. Note, this exception does not apply to dual lands which tap for White and another color. While the sample size is small, Magic Online auto-picked a Windbrisk Heights when it was the only "White" card in the pack. Unfortunately, it could also be that Magic Online randomly picked Windbrisk Heights and there is no correlation. We don't have enough information to say for sure.

If there are no White cards in the pack, Magic Online seems to pick randomly, but it randomly selects Black cards more often than it should. By my count we had eight situations where there were no White cards in the pack and Magic Online selected a black card five times. However, it also selected Daze, Pestermite, and Chandra Nalaar over Black cards. Interestingly, these picks all came in a row during pack two. In pack one, Magic Online always selected a Black card (typically the lowest CMC creature) if there was no White card and the same thing happened in pack three.

On a very unscientific note, we actually ended up with a really good White Weenie deck thanks to auto-picking. So maybe picking the lowest-CMC White card is by design rather than by error and the absent drafter still ends up with a semi-functional deck.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's all for today. I'm really curious to hear your observations from the draft. Why Terminus over Mentor of the Meek? Am I missing anything that would alter my theory of auto-picking? Leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions, and suggestions in the comments. You can reach me on Twitter (or Magic Online) @SaffronOlive.

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